Peter Griffin: Music on the move too costly

Talk to any music executive embittered by the rampant piracy of their labels' songs and they'll tell you growth in the industry in the next couple of years is going to come from song downloads to mobile phones.

You can see why. Mobile music services are impossible to pirate and the mobile provider and label always get paid.

Many phones already come with MP3 players built in, allowing you to load your music and listen to it as you go about your day. Vodafone and Telecom are now offering something a little different - the ability to buy songs on the move rather than set out with your selection of pre-bought songs. The music service is expected to appeal to the same impulsive buyers who happily spend a few dollars to download ringtones.

Vodafone launched its mobile music service last year. It was competent except for the fact that most of the phones were supplied with low-capacity memory cards, so a decent songlist couldn't be built up.

Motorola's tie-up with iTunes produced the ROKR music-playing phone but this failed for the same reason - it didn't have enough capacity to store music.

Now Telecom has the Telecom Music Store, accessible from the Sanyo 9000 clamshell phone.

The 9000's best feature is a 1GB mini-SD memory card for holding several hours' worth of songs.

The $699 phone has everything you need - a digital camera, a WAP internet browser, picture messaging, video player, MP3 player and push-to-talk messaging.

The non-standard earphone jack is annoying as the supplied earphones are poor quality and the music distorts at the least hint of bass. I can live with playing the music at a lower volume when I'm out and about.

The 9000 is a good phone and the download service is fast and efficient.

You can listen to the first 30 seconds of a song before buying it, while genre categories help you choose.

The selection of 300,000 songs, while not as extensive as Coketunes', is still good and the interface for searching the back catalogue is user-friendly.

What doesn't work is the $3.50-per-song charge, which is a shame as it is a pretty good service in other respects. Telecom has matched Vodafone's pricing for music downloads.

A Vodafone spokeswoman told me that the pricing was in line with that of overseas operators and research showed consumers were willing to pay it.

Really? I haven't come across one person in my informal research who'd cough up.

"Yeah, right," was the most common answer I got as I handed the Sanyo 9000 around among friends and told them eight songs would cost them the price of a new-release, full-length album.

Sorry, but it's got to be $1-$1.50 a track, at which price these types of services have a chance of appealing to more than the impulsive.

But maybe I'm wrong and people are prepared to pay.

After all, the mobile players added a whopping 200,000 new connections in the three months to December alone.